What Catholics Believe:  A Popular Overview of Catholic Teaching  by Leonard Foley, O.F.M.

 

If you are Catholic, this is post-Vatican II wrap-up and short catechism, and an invitation to deeper faith. If you are a no-longer-practicing Catholic, this is an invitation to take a fresh look at your old family.  If you come from a different religious tradition, welcome to this overview of what Catholics stand for.  If you have no religion, we hope this will be a new opening to God. 

Welcome to Our Catholic Faith!

1.  Who God is

 

2.  What God did

 

3.  Who Jesus is

 

4.  What Jesus did

 

5.  Who the Spirit is

 

6.  Who we are as Christ’s Mystical Body

 

7.  Who we are as visible Church

 

8.  What we are called to do as followers of Jesus

 

9.  What we do as the whole Church

 

10. ‘As we wait in joyful hope…’

Like Jesus, we each have our passion, death and resurrection. Faith sees death as the summing up of our great life-decision—made far ahead of time. Faith sees through the veil of death to the resurrection with Jesus. Our bodies—our persons—will be raised to new life—real, glorious, eternal—like that of the risen Jesus.

Heaven is being with God forever, face-to-face. We can only say, "Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9). If God has created earthly ecstasies, what must his greatest creation—heaven—be! On the other hand, hell is the condition of those who choose spiritual death with complete awareness and freedom, and remain in the attitude as they die. Finally, Catholics believe that those who die in God's grace but with some lingering self-centeredness will be purified before they will see God face-to-face.

This has been a feeble attempt to express in human words what cannot be described, because it is partly divine: God in his Church. Running the risk of oversimplification, we might say that our faith is this: God came visibly in Jesus to save all of us from our selfishness, isolation, brokenness, sin. Jesus gathers around himself a Body that is both spiritual and visible, whose main characteristic ought to be unity and love. We fail, day by day. But mercy prevails.